Recommended reading: These are Patti Smith’s 40 favourite books of all time

Even from a young age, Patti Smith was enamoured by the written word. If you’ve read her fantastic memoir Just Kids, you’d recall romantic passages where she describes hunting around second hand book stores for valuable editions to pay for rent and food, or making pilgrimage to Paris to pay her respects to Rimbaud.

“I was completely smitten by the book,” she recalls in the book’s opening chapters. “I longed to read them all, and the things I read of produced new yearnings.”

From Beats classics to Shakespeare to modern masterpieces, here is a list of Patti Smith’s 40 favourite books.

Although Smith is best known as a rock ‘n’ roller, she’s always been irrevocably entwined with books and poetry. As she remembers, her life was “sidetracked” by music, and she ended up choosing a path through which she could fuse her love of Rimbaud and Baudelaire with her love for rock music.

Ever an intriguing artistic and literary figure, you might wonder what she’d name as her favourite books of all time. Well in the late 2000’s, she (according to Vertigo) gave out a list of her favourites at the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

Check it out below, but keep in mind this was a while ago (if you’ve read her second memoir, M-Train, you’d remember that she adores Murakami, who doesn’t appear on the list – maybe he was a recent discovery for Smith).

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail BulgakovJourney to the East by Hermann HesseThe Glass Bead Game by Hermann HesseHeart of Darkness by Joseph ConradMoby Dick by Herman MelvilleBilly Budd by Herman MelvilleSongs of Innocence by William BlakeThe Wild Boys by William BurroughsHowl by Allen GinsbergA Season in Hell by Arthur RimbaudIlluminations by Arthur RimbaudWittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds and John EidinowVillette by Charlotte BronteThe Process by Brion GysinCain’s Book by Alexander TrocchiCoriolanus by William ShakespeareThe Happy Prince by Oscar WildeThe Sheltering Sky by Paul BowlesAgainst Interpretation by Susan SontagThe Oblivion Seekers by Isabelle EverhardtThe Women of Cairo by Gérard de NervalUnder the Volcano by Malcolm LowryDead Souls by Nikolai GogolThe Book of Disquiet by Fernando PessoaThe Death of Virgil by Hermann BrochRaise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters by J.D. SalingerFranny and Zooey by J.D. SalingerThe Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel HawthorneA Night of Serious Drinking by René DaumalSwann in Love by Marcel ProustA Happy Death by Albert CamusThe First Manby Albert CamusThe Waves by Virginia WoolfBig Sur by Jack Kerouac Anything by H.P. Lovecraft Anything by W.G. SebaldThe Thief’s Journal or anything by Jean GenetThe Arcades Project or anything by Walter BenjaminPoet in New York by Federico García LorcaThe Lost Honor of Katharina Blum by Heinrich BöllThe Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos TutuolaIce or anything by Anna KavanThe Divine Proportion by H.E. HuntleyNadja by André Breton